Bay 12 Games Forum

Have you tweaked [MAX_SITE_POP_NUMBER] to something larger?

That is all I had to do to increase survivability for elves and kobolds when genning small/smaller/pocket regions. I assume the greater numbers at a given site make it more likely to survive attacks from other races and/or megabeasts.

After tweaking this and expanding the biomes for Elves I found I had to tweak it back a bit because the elves were not only surviving, they were displacing the humans.

A few months into my first fortress I realized I have access to neither aquifer nor river.  I'm trying to temporarily patch the problem by making use of some nearby murky pools, but unless mud stays mud forever, I'm going to need an alternative source of food.  Help?

Murky pool is all you need. You don't even really need those, you just need to find underground water in a cavern system before your dwarves starve which isn't that hard to do(I've done it on a couple of embarks).

I'm a noob to DF and I don't Have sound on my downloaded version from may green website. What am I doing wrong here ?

he strips the music files from the archive to make it smaller.  copy them over from vanilla df if you want the music.

For many of us in 2.0 we reached a point were we wouldn't even CONSIDER playing on a map unless there was an esaily reached magma pipe.  So within the first year we would an inexhaustable supply of Smelters and Magma Forges  while All wood on the map could be turned over to the important and vital "Four Bs"
Beds
Barrels
Bins
Buckets

Now however... NOW We must dig down almost 50 to 60 Z levels, through 3 Underground worlds before reaching Magma.  And then, unless oyu are REALLY good with mgma pumps, you end up having to rebuild a fort down their so people don't die of thirst or hunger from the trip up and down.

SO I am curious, how is everyone coping at having to WORK for our magma now?

You make it sound much more difficult than it really is. Here is how I do it:

Step #1, find the middlemost point of the map on the 1st z-level down from the surface. Do a 2x2 up/down staircase for the first 8 levels.  This is where I put most of my fortress.  Centrally located so nothing is very far away, at least horizontally.  I play on 2x2 embarks, btw, so this 2x2 staircase puts a stairwell in each of the 4 tiles.

Step #2 next level down, dig 2x2 up staircase, then dig out 1 wall around that, making a 4x4 room with 4 up staircases in the middle.

Step #3 Dig 4 diagonal drifts, one in each corner, make them 4 or 5 units deep.

Step #4 put a door in the first tile of each diagonal drift. If something gets out of control at the bottom of one of the shafts all you have to do is close that door and build a wall on the fort side of it. The stone stockpile insures ready stone and situated where it is it shouldn't be more than 20-25 steps for an idle dwarf to get there and seal it up.  I've never had to do this, btw.  Every time I've breached a cave system with an up/down stairwell I've been able to seal off and work around at the dig face instead of up top.

Step #5 put a 4 tile stone stockpile in stair well room, on top of the up staircases.

Step #6 one at a time, dig a staircase to the bottom of the map at the end of each of your diagonal drifts. These drifts are to uncover the cavern systems, at least those parts of them near the center of the map.  If you break into one, go back up a layer, dig out to the side and build a floor over the staircase, immediately sealing it up.  If your miner is set to mason and you use a temp burrow you can have the miner who did the work seal it right back up.  Use the stone from the digging or the stone in the 4 stone stockpile back in the stairwell.

Step #7  The first shaft might uncover enough for you to find a nice, safe route to go top to bottom with your pump stack.  If not, repeat step #6 with each of the other drifts.  You'll uncover everything in the center of the map and be able to pick the best place to put your pumpstack.

Step #8  Once you pick the location for the stack, make a room at the very bottom with access to magma, use the usual channel methods to get magma through a fortification so that you can build a temporary forge/smelter down there.  Make a stockpile for your iron ore, build your smelter and forge, and start smelting ore, forging pipe sections and corkscrews.  You can stick a mason workshop down there too or use one up top and just cart your blocks down.

Step #9 While the forge area is getting setup have your miners dig out each layer of the pumpstack, your engravers smooth the stone, and your haulers remove the rubble.  Don't dig the channel tiles for a particular level until it is entirely smoothed or you might block access to one or more tiles for the engravers.

Step #10 Build your pumps from the bottom up once each level is complete.

While all this is going on you can have your carpenters/architects also building a windmill farm to power the stack.

Pump stacks work fine.  I've got approximately 147 pump in two stacks in my current fortress. I use a series of switches to direct power to whichever stack needs it from a wind farm.

You could power a pump stack with just one dwarf, but you'd have to do a lot of micro and it would be slow. Still, if the stack was built you could get one tile of liquid wherever you wanted it without it taking too awful long.

300 dwarves itself is an insurmountable challenge for my PC.  For those who didn't inherit their computer from Fred Flinstone I say:  Good luck!

I set my population cap to 80.

That gives me enough for every day to day job, 10-20 for military, and 30-40 left over for large projects.